Everything starts in the mind as a little thought that manifests on the outside through our actions. For customer service, the action must involve treating customers with value and respect consistently or else they’ll look for a better option.
This means that if your business is to be competitive and marketable, your support agents must have the right customer service mindset.
A customer support mindset creates a huge difference, and customers can easily notice when your support agents have or lack this mindset.
This blog will focus on how support agents can embrace a customer service mindset including tips and ways to develop it.
What is customer service mindset?
A customer service mindset involves the beliefs, mentality and attitudes that support team members must possess to create positive experiences for customers.
Support agents should embrace a customer-first strategy with the aim of pleasing customers. This can be achieved by identifying and meeting all their needs promptly .
With this mindset customers will feel valued because their voices are heard fostering customer trust and a lasting customer relations.
To have the right customer service mindset, there are a few components that support agents must possess.
They include professionalism, ethics, transparency, and patience, just to name a few, will drive support agents to make the best decisions when handling all types of customers.
Benefits of adopting a customer mindset
As customer expectations and demands continue to shift, what remains constant is the value of customer service.
Unlock the key to efficient customer service with a customer service mindset. Here are the benefits of having a customer service mindset:
- Gives businesses a competitive edge: With a customer service mindset, agents will provide exceptional services and treats customers positively. In return, your business will become highly competitive because most customers will prefer your brand.
- Higher customer satisfaction: Because of a customer service mindset, agents will always place their customers first and focus on solving their problems at all costs. This leads to customer satisfaction.
- Enhances problem-solving: Adopting a customer support mindset encourages support agents to be proactive and creative when addressing customer concerns.
- Strong brand perception and reputation: When your support team provides positive and consistent services, it enhances the brand’s reputation and perception, leading to more referrals and traffic to the business.
- Better financial strength: Constantly providing positive customer experiences creates opportunities for upselling and cross-selling, which will highly boost a company’s revenue.
- Improved employee satisfaction and morale: A positive work environment and culture is grounded on the fact that employees will always be valued and respected. This increases their motivation to work and boosts their morale and satisfaction.
Empowering your support team with a customer service mindset has lasting benefits beyond everyday interactions. It improves experiences for both customers and the business.
Ways to build the right customer service mindset
A lot of work must be done for agents to have a customer service mindset. This includes elements such as culture, people, tools, and policy.
When these strategies are used effectively, support agents will effortlessly have a customer service mindset. Let’s look at how this can be achieved:
- Culture: Clearly define your core values, vision and mission ensuring that they promote customer centricity. This enables support agents to learn and know how to effectively handle customers.
- Policy: Every business must have set policies that act as guidelines to inform performances. These policies are to be made by collecting feedback from all the involved stakeholders that is customers, executives, employees, etc. This will lead to data driven policy and decision making.
- Tools: Provide your employees with the necessary tools to empower, educate, and equip them with the soft skills required to develop a customer service mindset.
- People: Recruit your support team based on their ability to meet your business’s core values with the right attitude and proper judgment.
Example of customer support mindset
As companies strive to provide the best possible experiences to their customers, there are some who have perfected their customer service game.
What do you think is the secret ingredient? You guessed it right: embracing a customer service mindset. Here are some examples:
Ritz-Carlton’s unique agents’ training programs
Ritz-Carlton has a good reputation when it comes to their approach to customer service. Most business currently feel the pressure to provide their customers with positive experiences at all times.
With a focus on training, support agents can learn ways and tips on how to deliver consistent quality services.
At Ritz Carlton, their employees are provided with 250 hours of training per year through classroom meetings, workshops, seminars, online forums, and a one-on-one coaching session. This empowers agents to grow and stay competitive.
Zappos exceeding customers’ expectations
Zappos is an online retailer specializing in clothing and shoes. Through them, businesses all over the world can learn why having a customer service mindset is important and how it is the game changer that drives success.
To prove this, Zappos have a 365-day return policy on their products which includes free shipping. Most businesses only offer a 30-day return policy on their products, which is quite different from the route taken by Zappos.
By meeting customer expectations and demands, they have shown their commitment to their customers ensuring they feel valued and satisfied always.
Both Ritz-Carlton and Zappos are considered giants in their respective industries because they understood what customers want. This is only possible with a customer service mindset.
Through some of their common practices, businesses can learn how to develop and the importance of having a customer service mindset.
10 Tips to develop a customer service mindset
It takes a lot of time to grow and become a professional or an expert at our roles. Similarly, customer service experts had to undergo different stages of evolution to reach where they are today.
The following tips can be used by any support team struggling to adopt or improve their customer service mindset:
Be a leading example
As a leader, you have to do what you preach so that your team can learn and follow. As a support team lead, always be the point of reference and show the support agents what it means to have a customer service mindset.
Focus on creating positive customer experiences, maximizing on every opportunity and constantly growing your customer base.
This foundation ensures that every team member prioritizes the customer’s needs to deliver personalized customer services and customer satisfaction.
It becomes relatively easier for the support team to adopt a customer service mindset if their leaders show they value both the support team and the customer’s interests.
Seek customer feedback regularly
A great way to know if the support team has a customer service mindset is through customer feedback. Constantly seeking feedback from customers shows the desire for sustainable growth.
Feedback received can be used to improve overall customer service experience and reduce numbers of unhappy customers and customer churn rate.
If the feedback received is positive, it indicates the support team is headed in the right direction and has adopted a customer service mindset.
However, negative feedback provides insights on areas that require improvement to provide consistent services.
Feedback can be regularly collected using various methods such as:
- Customer satisfaction surveys (CSAT)
- Customer reviews
- Social media comments
- Customer contact forms
Cultivate a positive company culture
It is always said that charity begins at home. For the support team to be able to provide positive and quality service, they must learn from the company itself.
With a positive company culture, support team members will learn the value and importance of effective and transparent communication, respect, commitment to growth and providing quality services consistently.
This is a benchmark on how customers need to be treated when support teams adopt a customer service mindset.
The interactions with customers will become positive making the business more valuable and competitive.
To have a positive company culture, it is important to:
- Set clear company goals and objectives
- Have a reward system or incentive policy
- Hire skilled professionals
Authorize agents to solve problems
A lot of time, resources and energy is wasted when customer’s concerns can’t be resolved promptly pending approval from higher authorities.
Giving the employees the freedom to resolve customer issues without having to wait for approval is a show of trust placed on the support team.
They will repay this by proving their dedication to provide creative and proactive solutions which leads to customer satisfaction and customer retention.
Giving agents the authority to make decisions on their own reduces time wasting and makes them highly productive.
Celebrate the team’s excellent services
A celebration is a way of appreciating, recognizing and rewarding employees on their progressive performances.
The celebrations have to recognize performances at a team and individual level or both. Support activities are demanding, and celebration is a perfect way to reduce cases of customer service burnout.
Additionally, they’ll be psychologically motivated to continue strongly with their performances and easily adopt a customer service mindset.
Reward the team for their excellent services by:
- Providing them with incentives
- Promotions
- Offering performance-oriented bonus points
- Highlight and share moments of success
To make the rewards credible and fair for all employees, set up a performance-based system that ensures every employee is recognized and rewarded for their efforts.
Provide training opportunities
It’s through learning that support teams can remain competitive and grow by gaining the proper skills and experience.
This must be done regularly to ensure the support agents align with the current trends and are able to meet the ever-shifting customer demands.
Adopting a customer mindset can take a lot of time when the support agents are not trained.
By learning the basics and the philosophical aspects of having a customer service mindset, the agents become more confident in their duties thus enhancing their performance levels.
Empowering support agents is highly valuable when adopting a customer service mindset to avoid losing customers because of bad customer service experiences.
The stakes are currently very high with reports by Thrive Global indicating that 86% of customers stop interacting with brands after a single instance of bad customer service experience.
Establish a long-term customer relationship
Customers are unique, and every interaction with them comes with different impressions.
When support team build long term relationships with their customers, they develop positive impressions that foster customer loyalty.
A service mindset will define how support teams engage with customers as they gear towards providing quality and consistent services.
As the support teams nurture their relationships with customers, they must go the extra mile to provide customers with more than the basic services they offer.
With a customer service mindset, it is possible to build long term customer relationships by always:
- Providing proactive customer service
- Having soft skills such as empathy in customer service, communication, adaptability, etc.
- Communicating with customers in a more friendly and welcoming manner.
- Always seek customer feedback
- Conduct customer-follow up regularly
Understand customer’s point of view
The common phrase, “A customer is always right” shows how the value and weight placed on address their needs promptly and meet their demands that are in line with their shared perspectives.
One of the best ways to learn and grow as a company is by actively listening and taking feedback from customers.
Up to 66% of customers are in agreement that companies need to understand their needs to provide positive customer experiences that lead to customer satisfaction.
A customer service mindset makes it easier for support agents to prioritize their customer perspective thereby attracting much a wider base of customers.
Support teams can understand these customer’s perspectives by:
- Listening actively
- Understanding customer pain points
- Clear in their communication to avoid confusion or misinformation
- Placing themselves in the customer’s shoes
Highlight customer success
Celebrating customer success represents the care and value to your customers for their achievements.
Sharing customer success stories and achievements can inspire and motivate a support team to assist more customers effectively.
When a team sees the positive impact of their efforts, it enhances the desire to adopt a customer service mindset and help customers succeed.
These success stories can be shared on both internal and external platforms. Doing so creates a positive, customer-focused environment within the support team. This leads to a stronger customer commitment to ensure long-term customer satisfaction.
Engage support team in non-customer-facing activities
Provide your support team with other activities that are not customer facing for them to embrace a customer mindset.
A change in common or repetitive tasks makes the support team have a different view of solving customer problems. They become equipped with more skills and technical information that informs their customer interactions.
Activities could be in the form of:
- Involvement in documentation
- Collaborating with other customer-facing teams
- Cross-training with other members
- Projects that do not include customer facing roles
Lead the way with a customer service mindset
We’ve heard of the common saying, ‘Change starts from within.’ This mostly involves the thoughts, attitude, and beliefs to be able to make changes effectively and appropriately. The same applies to support teams when they adopt a customer service mindset.
While most of the customers’ concerns may be on the technical aspects of a product, it’s the personalized interactions during support that truly strengthen the relationship.
A customer service mindset ensures your support agents place their customers first, meets customer expectations and provides consistent high-quality services.
At BoldDesk, we have the most affordable and highly effective customer service software that can help reduce workloads for your support team, making it easier to focus on customer problems.
To enjoy these exemplary features, start a 15-day free trial today with instant access or schedule a live demo at your own convenience. For further inquiries, feel free to contact our support team.
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